I know "good luck" is an innocuous expression of goodwill, but it always seems a little weird to wish someone good luck in a matter that's supposed to be decided solely through legal reasoning -- especially when it's the judge wishing luck.

I'd be mad as hell if I was on that jury for weeks or months and got some stipend like $50 day, parking tickets not included.

Jurors are paid an attendance fee of $40.00 per day. Regardless of means of travel, jurors also receive round-trip mileage from their home to the courthouse at the rate currently authorized by the Internal Revenue Service. The court validates juror parking at specific parking lots near the courthouse and reimburses bridge tolls when applicable.
Source:http://www.cand.uscourts.gov/juryfaq#question_6 [uscourts.gov]

Many people cannot afford jury duty. The $40 a day does not cut it for many people. Of course I would "weasel" out of jury duty if it put my finances or employment in danger, especially if it was a trial between Google and Oracle, both with more money than they can throw away wrestled in lengthy trials. Employers may be forced to give you time off for jury duty, but when shit is hitting the fan at work, and even when it's not, taking that time off does not look good for you and your prospects of keeping your job. You try telling your employer that you're sorry the company is in one of the biggest crunch time periods in its history and you're one of the pivotal cogs in the machine, but you're going to be gone for a few weeks and see how long you stay employed there. It doesn't even need to be that hectic to attract the ire of your boss.

Jury duty as it exists right now is a load of crap. Jurors should be properly reimbursed for their time if jury duty is compulsory.

It happens, yes. I am not being delusional. Many employers practically expect you to request exemption from jury duty, unofficially, of course. They won't just up and fire you for going, but your willingness to leave when you're needed when it's so incredibly easy to get out of jury duty gives them added reason not to keep you when reviews come around.

Not that it applies in all cases, because some people do not have the skill set required to choose their place of work.

If my employer was a douche about jury duty (they aren't, fyi) I'd be getting a new job. Any employer who *expects* their workers to skip out on duty, especially such an important one, does not deserve intelligent or skilled workers.

I totally agree with you. I don't think it's acceptable for employers to act this way, and there are a lot of good ones out there. The problem is when you're stuck at a job with one who is, with limited prospects of employment elsewhere either due to the economy or what have you.

Employers may be forced to give you time off for jury duty, but when shit is hitting the fan at work, and even when it's not, taking that time off does not look good for you and your prospects of keeping your job. You try telling your employer that you're sorry the company is in one of the biggest crunch time periods in its history and you're one of the pivotal cogs in the machine, but you're going to be gone for a few weeks and see how long you stay employed there. It doesn't even need to be that hectic to attract the ire of your boss

What happens if you get hit by a bus? If the survival of the company relies on a single employee, that is a problem with the company, not the jury duty system.

I just love it, citizens of the US will stand up for trial by jury until their death, but jury service is something you always weasel out of with lame excuses.

Slavery is a lame excuse?

Right now I have a flexible schedule so I would do jury duty. But when I showed up they told me to go home. Bunch of lames. When I have a full-time salaried job I'm going to get out of jury duty by any means necessary.

Right now there's a fuckton of unemployed so there should really not be any difficulty finding someone for whom $40/day is worthwhile.

However, are you really sure you actually get that? Because when I was looking at Jury Duty in Santa Cruz that wasn't part of the deal,

google has shown time and time again that they a: constantly prevail in patents claims and b: absolutely refuse to settle.

they know what they are doing, and oracle's looking at maybe a million dollars these days. Quite a far cry from the billions, right? "whoops". Then we have this new doom and gloom, some idiot investor claiming their patent is the reason why google exists.

google has shown time and time again that they a: constantly prevail in patents claims and b: absolutely refuse to settle.

Your argument is that Google will win this lawsuit because they absolutely refuse to settle and always win?

That's not a very profound analysis of the case. Oracle has expensive lawyers too, and clearly they think they can win.

Oracle is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement, that doesn't include future licensing fees. That's directly from the article, you would know it if you had read it instead of just trying to make fun of Microsoft.

Oracle used to want billions of dollars in settlment. But after the patent office - after Googles arguments - found most of the patents Oracle had for invalid the settlement demands nowadays are alot less. Given that the copyright claims looks very scetchy to get through it looks like the outcome will be that Oracle loses some patents and get about zilch in compensation.

The reason they could not agree is that Oracle has not realized how badly its been going so far in the pretrial motions. Oracles demands ha

Not exactly. You can get damages for a single patent, but they won't be very high, and it paints a gigantic target on that patent as something to be worked around going forward so that there are no future royalties, which are what matter the most in this case because Android can be expected to sell a lot more in the future (as the mobile market expands) than it has in the past. That's why Oracle is so stupid: They come in here and get a bunch of their patents invalidated, and are going to end up paying like

I think Oracle was hoping for a quick settlement, in exchange for a piece of the Android pie. Look how they squandered J2ME for years and then they go seeking damages from Google on the basis of some spurious patents. I'm sure they thought they could muscle their way in and demand a few dollars licencing fee for every activated device or similar.

Now their patents have been whittled down to a couple both of which can probably be worked around this is little more than an argument about pocket change. Even i

Irrelevant, and that was Sun, not Oracle. It is important that you understand 'squandering' a patent is completely irrelevant to patent cases, look at the GIF submarine patent story as a reminder.

I didn't say squandered a patent. I said they squandered J2ME. Google turned up with something which in many respects is J2ME done properly and Sun / Oracle watched their market evaporate. Why would a licensee of J2ME want to stick with some antiquated piece of crap when they could have almost J2SE levels of functionality in a full blown OS AND not pay a penny for it either?

So immediately there is an axe to grind and there is a suspicion that in doing something so close to Java / J2ME that it hits a few p

So it boils down to patent claims mostly relating to compiler / VM technology and most of them have been cast out as irrelevant, spurious, obvious and so on and only a couple remain, one of them due to expire this year. Even if Oracle prevails, the amount of damages they receive are going to be a pittance compared to what they expected originally.

All it takes is one patent. Do you realize that? As one example, in 2007, Broadcomm won an injunction against Qualcomm, preventing any phones with Qualcomm technology from being imported into the US (that means basically every Sprint and Verizon phone), over two patents. It doesn't matter if only one remains, remember that.

I think Oracle was hoping for a quick settlement, in exchange for a piece of the Android pie. Look how they squandered J2ME for years and then they go seeking damages from Google on the basis of some spurious patents.

You mean plundered, right? J2ME was the cash cow of Java - all those cellphones running Java on them, all paying the license fees. J2SE, J2EE, Sun could care less about them - that was all given away. It's why the patent licenses were given to J2SE implementations, but never to J2ME because peo

"Oracle has expensive lawyers too, and clearly they think they can win."

Very expensive lawyers that happen to be the same very expensive lawyers that failed so catastrophically in SCO vs 'the world'. Expensive lawyers recycling the same delusional copyright theory they invented (and I chose that word deliberately) for SCO.... and when I say 'recycling' I really mean 'exactly the same'.

Invented while thinking they had a direct share of the bazillions it would generate. Hope they're giving Larry a good discou

Microsoft had nothing to do with this one. Here's the scene, a bright sunny meeting room at the top of Oracle Central Command. Sun lawyers and Oracle lawyers beadily eye each other across a polished table. Secretaries flutter about delivering yellow legal pads, pencils, and coffee. Uncle Larry has made his appearance and is now off to polish his yacht. The lead Oracle attorney speaks: so about this Java thing, youse guys think this is worth a lot? Sun lawyers: yep, beeelllions and beeellions of dollars. An

time is on his side. when was the last time it din't come out that MS wasn't behind a lot of malice and they were in fact helping companies from patent mess ? Microsoft is always fishing in troubled waters. SCO is a potent reminder of what Microsoft was/ will be capable of doing regardless of any temporary change of heart for PR purposes. MS went out of the way to scuttle the entire ISO organization's legitimacy by rigging the entire system worldwide to support ooxml, just shows they have never changed as an abusive entity

"An Ars Technica article sources Groklaw stating that at Portugal's national body TC meeting, "representatives from Microsoft attempted to argue that Sun Microsystems, the creators and supporters of the competing OpenDocument format (ODF), could not be given a seat at the conference table because there was a lack of chairs."[37]
In Sweden, Microsoft notified the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) that an employee sent a memo to two of its partners, requesting them to join the SIS committee and vote in favor of Office Open XML in return for "marketing contributions".[38] Jason Matusow, a Director in the Corporate Standards Strategy Team at Microsoft, stated that the memo was the action of an individual employee acting outside company policy, and that the memo was retracted as soon as it was discovered.[citation needed] SIS have since changed its voting procedure so that a member has to actually participate before he is allowed to vote.[39]
Sweden invalidated its vote (80% was for approval) as one company cast more than one vote, which is against SIS policy.[40]
Finnish IT journalists described that meeting as raising strong differences in opinions.[41][42]
In Switzerland, SNV registered a vote of "approval with comments," and there was some criticism about a "conflict of interest" regarding the chairman of the UK 14 sub-committee, who did not allow discussion of licensing, economic and political arguments.[43][44] In addition, the chairman of the relevant SNV parent committee is also the secretary general of Ecma International[citation needed], which approved OOXML as a standard. Further complaints regarded "committee stuffing", which is however allowed by present SNV rules, and non-adherence to SNV rules by the UK 14 chairman, which resulted in a re-vote with the same result.[citation needed]
Australia's national standards body, Standards Australia, was criticized for its handling of the OOXML process by the New Zealand Open Source Society,[45] the open source advisory firm Waugh Partners, Australian National University Professor Roger Clarke[citation needed], OASIS lawyer Andrew Updegrove[citation needed], IBM[citation needed] and Google[citation needed]. Standards Australia sent ISO SC 34 expert and XML and Schematron specialist Rick Jelliffe to the BRM, despite critics[46] alleging that Jelliffe would not represent the views of those opposing the standardization. Jelliffe had previously been in the news after being offered payment by Microsoft to improve incorrect Wikipedia articles about Office Open XML.[47] Microsoft had bought a schema conversion tool from his company and he had performed the initial conversion of the Office Open XML schemas from XML Schemas to RELAX NG[citation needed], both schema languages he had been involved in standardizing. It was alleged that Standards Australia had broken a previous public pledge to send two internal employees to the BRM.[48][49] However Standards Australia issued a press release denying this and stating that the Computerworld article was "was riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations.”[50]
Norway's vote was decided by Standard Norge; the mostly opposing viewpoints of the technical committee were ignored after members were unable to reach consensus. Membership in the technical committee had risen from 6–7 to 30 members; all of the pre-OOXML members argued in favour of a "no" vote.[51][52][53][54] In October 2008, 13 of the 23 members, 12 of which are associated with the open-source movement,[55] resigned[56] after OOXML was ratified by ISO and all appeals were rejected.
The IDABC community programme (which is managed by the European Commission) runs the "Open Source Observatory" which is "dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software."[57] Via its "Open Source News", it has reported on reports which criticize the standardization process.
It states that the German IT news site Heise reports that in Germany, two opponents of Office Open XML,

Microsoft has been ordered by the EU to pay hundreds of millions for anti-competetive behaviour and was convicted several times.

You are a hopeless Microsoft fanboy, if not worse (shill/employee) if you still think that MS is benign.Throughout its entire existence, MS based its business model on shady practices like lying, deceiving, manipulating and plain blackmail. Hell, even DOS (which MS did not develop) is based on betraying and lying to that small canadian one man company. Windows 1.0 was based on lyin

Have they ever done something NOT wrong?
Seriously. Just give me ONE example. Just one.

Seriously, I really dislike Microsoft, but even I can do this with about ten seconds to think. My example is MS-DOS. I was using a lot of different OSes at that time because there was nothing approaching uniformity, and frankly there wasn't anything else that ran on that level of hardware that I liked better. Closer to current, Windows XP is still viable today and it's not that bad. I use Ubuntu personally, but I didn't delete my XP partition and it still gets used for some business apps that I need to

because the two aren't mutually exclusive and it's completely irrelevant, you might as well put up a post about oracle and google's lawsuit and end it with an attack on apple's abuse of chinese workers or something, just to get it up-modded.

Why do you insist on attempting to turn this story into something that feeds an anti-Microsoft agenda? The title of this story is "Oracle and Google Settlement Talks Falter; Trial Set for April 16." The word "Microsoft" doesn't appear in that, nor does it appear in the summary.

It seems you have an axe to grind, and are taking any road you think leads to the outcome you want. Listen, I was born in 1981. I was raised on a mix of CP/M [wikipedia.org], MS-DOS [wikipedia.org], HP-UX [wikipedia.org], SysV [wikipedia.org], and Win 3.1x [wikipedia.org] systems. In my early teens, I got into BS [wikipedia.org]

Do note that since this started, Florian has been portending doom and gloom for Google at each step, and now we're down to a single issue, a judge who isn't giving a kind ear to Oracle's demands, and a refused settlement offer from Google to Oracle.

When this was supposed to end Android and all of Google's mobile ambitions, at least according to Florian.

You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but I respectfully disagree. It has been my experience that Florian Mueller has an agenda and it is not for the betterment of FOSS. In the cases I have read on his blog, his analysis is wrong at least as much as it is right. That said, he is not a journalist, nor a lawyer, but a blogger and entitled to his opinion. Like any blog, I would recommend you read it with some skepticism.

My personal view on JAVA is don't let the door hit you hard on the ass on the way out. And good riddence.

Yup, Java helped kill Sun. If Android knows whats good for it, it will drop Java in favour of better languages and native compilation, possibly Qt as the toolset and D or C++ as the compiler with javascript and python support too.

Linux damaged the Solaris market, and Intel x86 made Sparc a less compelling hardware platform.

Java kept Sun distracted as their core revenue streams were eroded.

As Sun tried to turn Java into a revenue stream, they diverted money, technical expertise and management attention from Solaris and Sparc. Java (particularly JavaEE) also made their acquisitions (Forte etc) difficult as Sun tried to shoehorn Java into products that didn't need it.

Considering that Java was one of the reasons that Oracle bought Sun for a good price, and that the Solaris and Sparc platforms were dying off anyways, in the end Java paid for itself and did Sun well by it.

As for Oracle, they have no need to fixate on Java because they already make immense profits on their database and related software.

The only thing LtT (Larry the Tyrannt) wants is $$$$ to purchase more yachts.

The only that is going to happen is appeal regardless of who wins, and the only way the google can put this ogre out of business is to slay it with some sort of the same crap... patents...and lawsuits.... not my thing... but that unfortunately is now the norm, sadly.

I have a solution. License and update Android with.NET, and host the legacy apps with something like this: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/IKVM-NET-Building-a-Java-VM-on-the-NET-Framework-Scott

For in-depth, of course, groklaw.net, but in short: Oracle (aka One Raving A*hole Named Larry Ellison) filed suit on the Googleplex for beeelyuns of dollars claiming Android and its Dalvik VM infringed various patents and copyrights in Java they own from the Sun acquisition.

Google countered that a) Sun never raised the issue back when Android first came out and Oracle shouldn't now be able to claim damages (legal term: laches) b) Dalvik was based on the Apache Harmony project, a "clean-room" implementation c) many/all of the patents now claimed by Oracle are dubious.

On review, many of the patents *have* been overturned on review, and at this point Oracle's claims are chiefly based on infringing about three dozen of the Java *APIs* as regards arrangement of arguments, etc. The potential damages have been substantially cut back as well, after the judge threw out two claim reports by Oracle, to around $44 million.

Google countered that a) Sun never raised the issue back when Android first came out and Oracle shouldn't now be able to claim damages (legal term: laches) b) Dalvik was based on the Apache Harmony project, a "clean-room" implementation c) many/all of the patents now claimed by Oracle are dubious.

I really hope those weren't Google's arguments. Because we know submarine patents exist, and they don't have to be sued the instant an infringing product is released - see every patent lawsuit in recent history, in